3 “Proto-Orientalist Concepts of Sufism” ‘‘Proto-Orientalist Concepts of Sufism’’ 1 Carl W. ERNST * One of the major issues in religious studies over the past few centuries has been how to conceptualize the diverse aspects of Islam, which has all too often been placed into an oppositional relationship with European Christianity and with “the West” in general. A key part of this effort was the understanding of what we now call Sufism, which can be called a tradition of ethical and spiritual practice found throughout Muslim societies and beyond. Some years ago I drew attention to the formation of the term and concept of Sufism in the early phase of British Orientalism in India, under the guidance of figures such as Sir William Jones and Sir John Malcolm [Ernst 1997]. Very much an example of Enlightenment classification of religious “isms,” the identification of “Sufism” as a category was tied to a hostility toward Islam, and it demonstrated the conviction that all Oriental mysticism derived from India. In these studies, produced at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Sufism was defined as separate from Islam and was assumed to derive from some other source, generally Indian. This early scholarship tended to ignore the self- understanding of Sufi authors who saw their tradition as emerging directly from the religious impact of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad. Yet there were previous European encounters with Sufis prior to the creation of the term “Sufism,” and these too played a role in the conceptualization of this category of religion. 2 Early travelers who spent years in India and Persia had recourse to a vocabulary that explicitly compared the Sufis either to Christian monks or to marginal religious groups in contemporary Europe, particularly the heretical Quietist movement. At the same time, they anticipated British Orientalists in assuming the fundamental identity between Sufi doctrines and Hindu * University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. 1 An earlier version of this essay has been published in Ernst [2017: 464–83]. 2 Europeans often also used the word Sufi (or Sophy) to refer, confusingly, to the Safavid dynasty that ruled Persia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Particularly in view of the anti-Sufi attitudes of the Safavid dynasty and its clerical supporters, this usage is irrelevant to the discussion that follows. 01_02_Carl Ernst_ver2.indd 3 01_02_Carl Ernst_ver2.indd 3 2018/06/08 17:45:35 2018/06/08 17:45:35